Transcatheter procedures have enabled minimally invasive procedures that reduce morbidity, improve recovery time, and permit interventions to be performed on subjects who are not otherwise candidates for surgery. For example, transcatheter cardiovascular procedures have been widely used in recent years to perform angioplasty, place coronary artery stents, replace diseased or injured heart valves, and treat heart valve dysfunction by compressing the myocardial wall overlying the valve. However, advances in transcatheter procedures have been accompanied by challenges in developing technologies for remotely manipulating and modifying tissue and other objects within the body through the catheters.
One such challenge has been developing technology utilizing transcatheter procedures for encircling a target structure within the body with a continuous loop, such as a suture, such that the loop can be remotely tightened to compress the target structure around which the loop is positioned.